Large Buyout Performance Ranking - 2023
This list just came out ranking all large-buyout funds by performance (Raised between 2010-2019). I can't speak to the methodology, but cool to see a few names on here I haven't heard of. Any surprises?
Here's the ranking:
4. Hg
6. Waterland Private Equity Investments B.V.
8. GTCR
9. Thoma Bravo
10. Clayton Dubilier & Rice
12. Thomas H. Lee Partners
14. Audax Private Equity
15. Hellman & Friedman
16. Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe
17. American Industrial Partners
18. TDR Capital
19. Olympus Partners
20. EQT
The top five firms on this list all have a meaningful presence in tech.
Not as familiar with the Waterland PE group, anyone have any insights on this group?
Mid-market buy-and-build beast in Europe. It seems to be getting more spotlight in recent years. There is a WSO thread you can find.
When your firm is in the top 5 but doesn't even feature in the tiers list people circulated in that tech PE shop thread...
Trust it’s better to be underrated because only the reals one know. So you get the best quality of candidates instead of people chasing prestige!
The real question and testament to thoughtful investing / operational expertise is going to be the performance of funds that were raised after 2019...easy to see how meaningful the gravy train of tech investing was in the '10-'19 decade.
Any color on Olympus Partners? They were investors in Lyft.
Vista isn't on the list, but all of their competitors are
Their last fund was 2019 vintage, so just enough to be in the range but not enough to have any meaningful exits yet.
^^This.
And Silver Lake?
That doesn't make sense... Vista has raised multiple funds between 2010-2019 and I'd assume this list includes them. And even if what you said made sense, TB raised XIII in 2019 and is on the list.
Edit: even if your logic made sense, the 2019 fund came out 5 years ago, which is definitely means the investment performance is meaningful. TB XIII raised in the same year and has 27% IRR, so investment performance is meaningful
Vista won PEI Tech PE firm of the year this year. The reason I bring this up is because their strategy of buy and build is meaningfully different from Thoma, so would take justifiably longer to see successful exits. Clearly are starting to sell some of these companies and boost the IRR of their 2019 vintage so wouldn’t be surprised to see them appear on similar lists in the next couple of years as things shake out.
There is no way Waterland is a top performing fund, they just build nonsensical platforms
Further proof that any of these "ranking" lists circulating WSO are also, nonsensical.
Nothing more than positive or negative confirmation bias for a bunch of incoming summer analysts and sophomores on this forum.
This ranking is literally based off of actual performance...
I would build “non-sensical platforms” any day if it means 5.0x MoM
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